In this panel, we had three specialists giving views on monsters from different parts of the world and how they fit in with the different cultural and historical specificities of those areas. What made a creature or idea monstrous or outside society's norms in different cultures? How many of those ideas were shared, and what differences do?
This panel featured the following people:
Tineke D'Haeseleer was trained as a sinologist at Leuven University (Belgium), and got her PhD in mediaeval Chinese history at Cambridge University in 2012. For two decades she taught classical Chinese and East Asian history in the UK, the Netherlands and the US. She is the editor of China's Magical Creatures (and Where to Find Them), a free, open online textbook written by her students, and she is a co-translator of the eighth-century Essentials of Governance (Cambridge Univ.Press, 2020).
Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with his wife, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, in 2008. The company publishes translations of bestselling Indian-language pulp fiction, folklore, and graphic novels. He is the co-author, with J. Furcifer Bhairav, of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India.
Rebecca Merkelbach is assistant professor of Old Norse-Icelandic studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has published on the paranormal and the monstrous in medieval Icelandic literature, including the book Monsters in Society (De Gruyter, 2020), on storyworlds and worldbuilding, and on the late medieval Sagas of Icelanders.
The panel was chaired by
Liam Downs-Tepper.
LinksChina's Magical Creatures (and Where to Find Them): https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/
Blaft Publications: https://www.blaft.com/